


Legendary

by thedevilchicken



Category: Tombstone (1993)
Genre: Blood, Canonical Character Death, Community: smallfandomfest, M/M, Mid-Canon, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Reminiscing, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 21:03:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4277805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their first three meetings, and their last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legendary

**Author's Note:**

> Written for smallfandomfest 17. The prompt used here is "They're not nearly as drunk as they pretend."

The first time Wyatt met John Holliday he’d just ridden 400 miles near unbroken out of Kansas; he was as tired as he’d ever been, a little saddle-sore and fairly itching to get his paws on the bastard son of a whore who’d necessitated his long journey out of Dodge. He stepped into the Bee Hive Saloon dusty and disposed to be cantankerous to find Rudabaugh who’d robbed the railroad camp was now, it seemed, nowhere to be found. And ten minutes later he sat down with a man he’d never met before but who smiled just like he knew him. 

“John Holliday,” the fellow said and they shook hands then over the poker table where, local hearsay had it, he spent better than a half share of his waking life. “I’m sorry to say the man you’re so diligently seeking, Mr Earp, is heading back to Kansas as we speak.”

Wyatt thinks he might’ve cursed at that though he found himself amused at least a little by the turn of phrase; the prospect of a 400-mile return journey back to Kansas and Dodge City didn’t hold a lot of pleasure for him. And so he ordered a drink and then another and his dandy new companion matched him measure for measure with near surprising ease, and then some more on top. Holliday was a strange sort, Wyatt knows he thought back then, a real southern gent, well-spoken and well-dressed but cautious round the edges with pale, sharp eyes that watched the room intently. When they’d talked an hour or two and he’d beaten Wyatt soundly there at poker, well, Wyatt just laughed it off to the dealer’s great surprise. Hell, Holliday had beaten him in some great style at the very least.

They moved to a table later after that, away from the games that Wyatt had such little patience for back then, and they drank some more, then some more. Holliday was free with his story that night and Wyatt listened as he talked and talked, the Georgian drawl quite a novelty for a mid-market saloon there in Fort Griffin, Texas. He knew who Wyatt was, of course; Wyatt Earp had quite the reputation even then. John Holliday’s was still a work in progress.

Next, they moved upstairs. Holliday was renting a room and had more liquor waiting up inside it and so Wyatt went up with him, stumbling on the stairs. They hung their hats and coats on the stand there behind the door after they’d missed the hooks once or twice and Holliday poured two glasses of something strong that might’ve been whiskey and might’ve been bourbon and Wyatt just can’t quite recall which it was. What sticks with him about that night, what’s with him even now, is John Holliday’s hands at his necktie after two or three sticky spilled glasses, plucking at his well-starched collar, pulling him up to his feet from the chair. He let him do it. 

He remembers the bed that was so nearly too small for two full-grown men, sitting at the side of it to pull off his boots while Holliday was on his knees behind him, hands on his bare skin. He remembers the tickle of moustaches at the back of his neck, how they laughed as they fell together shirtless on the lump-filled mattress and neither one of them could get it up more than half the way for all the alcohol still in them. It wasn’t to be a great success but somehow Wyatt couldn’t call it unsuccessful either.

“I should go,” Wyatt said, not moving an inch but the words came up anyway. 

“Nonsense,” Holliday replied, swatting Wyatt’s chest with the back of his hand perhaps a little harder than was necessary. “Stay here. There’s enough room for two if you don’t mind things cosy.”

Wyatt was too damn tired to make an argument to the contrary and didn’t care to anyway. He fell asleep right there, drunk and warm and oddly cheered. 

He woke in the morning when the door to the room flew open; he opened his eyes and in bustled a woman with long dark ringlets and black lace gloves that stretched up to her elbows, a woman with a jug of steaming water that she set down heavily over on the dresser, its contents sloshing carelessly onto the well-worn wood. Wyatt yanked the sheets up to his chin but she paid him no mind anyway, just went to the man still snoring there beside him and woke him with a quick, stiff shake. 

“You’ve forgotten your duel,” she told him, her accent hard to place, and he groaned as she swept back out the way she’d come. The door snapped shut behind her and Wyatt turned an inquisitive look on his companion; he’d meant to leave the bed before dawn but there they both still were. Holliday just yawned and stretched then smiled a lazy smile that Wyatt somehow couldn’t keep himself from returning before he shook himself back out of it.

“Your lady friend…” he said, trailing off as he saw no way to complete the thought to sound neither priggish nor impertinent. He had no great desire to be either at that moment.

“This is _not_ the first time Kate’s discovered me in bed with a strange man,” Holliday told him then, with that same blithe smile, as if that made the situation any better and Wyatt guessed at least it didn’t make it any worse. “She is nevertheless correct,” he continued. “I do have a duel on the books for today. Would you be so kind to step up as my second, Mr Earp?”

Wyatt laughed out loud as they looked at each other; he said yes because he couldn’t find it in himself to say anything that wasn’t yes, even if the notion did test the limits of the law there in Fort Griffin. They washed and they dressed and they went out together to the ground chosen prior for the duel, and then Wyatt watched John Holliday disarm his day’s opponent with one swift shot to the hand. There was no sense on Wyatt’s part that Holliday hadn’t meant that shot entirely; somehow he was sure he’d meant to stay just the right side of the law for the sake of his new friend. He never has discovered what the dispute had been between them. He never thought to ask before it was much far too late and besides all that he doubts Doc would’ve remembered. 

“It’s been a pleasure, Mr Earp,” John Holliday told him, watching Wyatt mount his horse to leave. He held up his hand and Wyatt shook it with a smile. 

“Under the circumstances, I think you’d better call me Wyatt.”

“Wyatt, then.” It sounded so familiar. 

He assumed they’d never meet again. He was wrong.

***

The second time Wyatt met John Holliday, everyone now knew him as Doc. And Doc Holliday saved his life that day.

A band of cowboys rode into Dodge, shooting shit up all along the way; they didn’t take much tracking but Wyatt tracked them then to the Long Branch Saloon and strode in with guns drawn. It was fixing to be the end of him right then and there in the midst of all that raucous laughter and games and cheap whiskey spilled on dusty floors, when two-dozen cowboys set their sights on him with drunken, itchy trigger fingers. But then there was Doc Holliday as if from the air with his pistol to the leader’s head, and a smile at his lips. 

“Wyatt,” Doc said, with a salutational nod that Wyatt returned with a tip of his hat. 

“Doc.”

Doc cocked his gun, returning his attention quite deliberately to the matter then at hand. “Now, I want you to think long and hard about your situation here,” he said. “Are you a betting man? I’ll lay odds your boys can’t shoot me dead before I paint my good friend’s boots with your cretinous brains.”

The cowboys left the bar. Doc smiled at Wyatt; Wyatt smiled at Doc. They took a table, and they talked. 

Later, they weren’t nearly as drunk as they pretended. They stumbled down the ill-lit street to Doc’s hotel and up the stairs into his room, leaning one against the other, rowdier than they really meant to be or alcohol consumption warranted. Hats and coats were easily discarded and Doc lit a lamp up by the bed that made his sickly skin glow warm for once. Hands tugged at ties and collars, gun belts clattered to the floor at their feet in the lamplight, laughter as Wyatt hopped to pull off his boots that bumped to the floor in a flurry of spurs he’d never thought to remove and Doc calmly took a seat to deal with his. Doc’s hands slid to the waist of Wyatt’s slacks and eased them down, his palms hot on Wyatt’s new-bared skin. Then Doc pulled him down onto the bed, on top of all the sheets like he had no propriety in him then at all and Wyatt guessed that much was true. Doc Holliday was unlike any other man he’d ever known. 

They weren’t even half as drunk as they pretended except maybe on the fact that Doc had saved his life. Doc spread his legs and quirked a brow and Wyatt chuckled lowly, blaming alcohol when he knew he had nothing like that then as an excuse. He was pretty sure he was breaking laws when he leant there on one arm and let his free hand trail down over Doc’s slim waist, between his thighs, but he still remembers what that was like, that first time, that night. Doc turned over onto hands and knees and Wyatt oiled himself, rubbed the head of his cock between Doc’s cheeks till Doc cursed at him most colourfully, somehow jovial and wicked with it. Then he was in him, balls-deep and straining hard, hands gripping tight at Doc’s slim hips as he told him _harder, harder, harder Wyatt I’m not made of fucking glass_ until the headboard was beating dents into the thin plaster walls and Wyatt felt like his heart was going to jump on up right out of his mouth. 

He came with a shout he couldn’t have muffled if he’d wanted to try, pretty sure he’d pulled a muscle or five in the process; Doc brought himself off quickly after that, with his own hands, as Wyatt watched with eyes as round as saucers. Doc laughed at him, maybe with him, as he cleaned them both up and then brought a pair of fresh drinks to the bed. Wyatt felt like he needed it. He wasn’t drunk enough for this, not nearly as drunk as he’d hoped that it seemed. 

Wyatt knew he shouldn’t stay the night but did, tangled up in sheets, one arm wedged in tight under Doc’s closest shoulder so he woke in the morning with no feeling there at all and Doc poking him experimentally, amused by the way Wyatt frowned and cursed as sensation came back in tingling bursts. Doc had bruises at his hips that matched the span of Wyatt’s hands and so he rested one hand there, fitting it to patterns of contusions as Doc watched him pensively but didn’t even look as thought he thought about stopping him from it. Perhaps he could’ve stopped him, Wyatt thinks. Doc had a certain reputation for being quick on the draw and deadly of aim; luckily, he never aimed in Wyatt’s direction.

“Are you gonna stick around in Dodge?” Wyatt asked, pressing down firmly with his hand, making Doc raise his brows at either the unexpected question or the pinch of the bruise and he had no plans to find out which. 

“I suppose I might,” Doc replied. 

Wyatt guessed that meant no. It turned out he was wrong again. 

***

The third time he met Doc Holliday, what he really needed was a damn good dentist. Luckily for him, Doc _was_ a good dentist. 

Technically, Doc had stopped practicing dentistry when he’d left Texas for Kansas and Fort Griffin for Wyatt’s town, Dodge City. Wyatt recalls that Doc told him all about his former profession the first time they met, about school up in Pennsylvania and how he’d had a string of practices across the southwest when he’d moved out that way, once he’d had his diagnosis. Wyatt remembers looking at Doc then across the table, really looking, trying to see the sickness in him beyond the red-rimmed eyes that were probably more the result of drink and long nights of poker than tuberculosis. It was hard to see it at all back then in the gambling gunfighter Doc had made himself and Wyatt didn’t like to ask about it, never really did then or after. But mostly, he couldn’t imagine the man as a dentist at all. 

Still, a dentist Doc was and there Wyatt found himself that strange, hot Thursday morning three weeks after he’d been saved from a bullet to the head. There he was, once Doc was through grousing about being woken from a most delightful dream, while he dug out all his old equipment, sitting in Doc’s hotel room because hell if the man ever wanted to commit to owning his own home and since Doc hadn’t had an actual practice in months, it was Doc’s room or the shady dentist elsewhere in the city who Wyatt regarded with the utmost suspicion. He occasionally wonders why the same was never true of his regard for Doc, but he guesses that once the man had saved his life it was hard not to trust him with his teeth.

He spat blood into a bowl for thirty minutes after, once Doc had pulled his godforsaken broken tooth. A little laudanum meant it didn’t hurt but Doc kept reaching over with a handkerchief to blot away blood from his chin and Wyatt was pretty sure he’d have drowned in it if he’d let his eyes drift closed too long. He guesses that was why he stayed there so long after. It’s as good a rationalisation as any he can find for it. 

“You just need to take your mind off it, Wyatt,” Doc said, and even in his haze of opium Wyatt did register this as being a strongly bad idea; he thinks, to his credit, that he did try to fend Doc off when he straddled his thighs there at the table that still had all the articles of dentistry laid out across it, straddled him on the dining chair and settled himself down, when he bent in to kiss him like all the blood Doc had tasted in his own mouth over the years made the blood in Wyatt’s seem somehow commonplace. It wasn’t commonplace for Wyatt, not the sickly tang of copper in his mouth, not the solid press of another man’s body against his own that he’d felt the desire for so infrequently down the years, moustaches and hands callused from riding and shooting and who knew what else knowing Doc. He was surprised to find he _did_ know Doc, on the other hand; in those three weeks since Doc’s timely intercession, the two had been joined at the hip. Wyatt suspects he knew even then that they would always be. 

The room was relatively small and drab and miserable by Doc’s usual standards and the bed too hard though wide enough, but Wyatt remembers being charmed by it all in the oddest way as it spun around him and Doc helped him out of his clothes, kept him from falling or banging his head or tripping over his feet as he laughed, reeling. Doc’s quick fingers unbuckled his gun belt and set it aside with deliberate care, fished out his pocket watch and set it down amongst the bloody instruments on the table on its own individual handkerchief. Wyatt’s head was swimming with him, with laudanum and the heat, with the pulse in his neck and the heat of his skin in the too-hot room, with the way he knew right then in a flash that Doc was a smart man and an educated man and a deadly man even if two thirds of his reputation was comprised of rumour. Doc knew just how to encourage rumour; he’d made himself invincible with it. 

Then he was down, guided down, naked in Doc’s bed, over him and in him, hair falling over his eyes when he lowered his head to the hollow of Doc’s throat and so Doc reached up to push it back with both hands and a ready, sunlit smile. When he woke later, hours later, almost the full length of the day later, in twilight through the hotel window after the laudanum was out of him, the bottle stoppered in a drawer, Doc’s pale skin was smudged in blood in all the many places Wyatt’s mouth had been. He found he couldn’t find it in himself to be disgusted. It was just another item on the list as long as Wyatt’s arm of the things the two of them shared.

***

The last time Wyatt met Doc was in Colorado. Doc was 36 years old, and he was dying. 

He stepped into the room and he saw Doc there in the bed, the little single bed that could not have held the both of them even if it hadn’t been impossible in front of all the staff and other patients there in the private sanatorium. He sat down on the chair at the side of the bed instead and he looked at him; it wasn’t hard to see the sickness now, hadn’t been for years, but that didn’t make it any easier to see it in the end. Doc had been dying every day that Wyatt had known him, just like every man except a fraction faster. 

They’d met again over the years that came after Dodge, of course. Las Vegas in New Mexico where Doc opened a saloon and stayed for a while because the hot springs there around the town were somehow good for his sickness, not that he ever spoke about it; Prescott over in Arizona where they lingered a few short weeks before Wyatt left for Tombstone and what he’d hoped vainly might be a peaceful life. Sometimes Kate was there and sometimes she wasn’t and Wyatt found he preferred the latter, when Doc would smoke in bed propped up against the headboard till mid-morning and the sun was high and Wyatt had no particular job to do now he’d officially handed in his star. He’d watch Doc gamble in the evenings, sometimes joining in himself except he preferred a good cigar and a glass of something strong where he could lean his chair back against the wall and watch Doc Holliday the gambler at his work. He was an excellent gambler, till the end, with a smart mouth and a quick wit backed up with a quicker draw that got the two of them into and out of scrapes more frequent that Wyatt cares to recollect for a lawman. 

Then sometimes they’d ride their horses out of town, line up coloured glass bottles to shoot into shards like either of them needed the practice and they weren’t just out there to give Doc’s diminishing lungs dry air to breathe not filled with the dust kicked up in town by carriages. They didn’t talk about his sickness. Wyatt always pretended he couldn’t see it in him at all, like he hadn’t when they’d met.

He shaved Doc’s face one day there in the sanatorium, putting him back to his usual tidy order while Doc talked about things they both remembered; he was thinking of another time and another place when Wyatt cursed as he shaved one morning, seated at the dresser mirror in a rented room with a trickle of blood that ran down from his jaw to his collarbone. Doc came over half-dressed and took the razor from him, tilted back his chin with his fingertips. Wyatt let him. Wyatt watched him do it in the mirror. 

“I know what I’m doing, Wyatt,” Doc said, and Wyatt didn’t doubt it as he felt the razor at his throat. Doc was coughing more often then, looking worse with every passing week and they didn’t talk a word about it just like they never really had. Wyatt knew he’d miss him once he’d gone. He’d never had a better friend, or a stranger one. 

But then Tombstone came with Mattie and with Josephine who Wyatt loved like Doc did Kate, the other Earps and the Cochise County Cowboys, and Doc was so damn sick he could barely stand; Wyatt could barely stand to look at him. What should’ve been Wyatt’s happy retirement was bitter in so many ways, not just those nights when Kate was conspicuous in her absence, when Wyatt went into Doc’s room to find him drunk and shivering. Sometimes he thought Doc might’ve died in the night while he sat there beside him on the unmade bed, thinking of nights in Dodge City when the two of them would sit cleaning their pistols at Wyatt’s kitchen table while Doc told him all the things he did and didn’t miss about Georgia. 

He remembers thinking Colorado was too cold for Doc, that the dry heat out there in New Mexico or the Arizona Territory might’ve been a better salve for his ailing lungs, but Doc seemed happy enough in the sterile white sanatorium. Perhaps he’d just forgotten to care for his surroundings as they played bad hands of cards at the bedside until he barely had the strength to move at all. Wyatt would help him to sit up in bed and he saw Doc try not to despise him for this smallest of petty assistances. Mostly he succeeded. 

They went there after Johnny Ringo, riding on together before Josephine in the carriage who followed behind, Doc’s breath short and shorter every day. Sometimes Wyatt would slip down from his own horse and swing himself up onto Doc’s, shift up behind him despite the inconvenience of the shaped leather saddle and let him rest back heavy against him, let him close his eyes as Wyatt took the reins. At night they’d find the nearest town and take a room, share the bed and let the horses rest, and Wyatt’s hands on Doc’s bare skin in the low light of the lamps seemed to wake him for a time, all smiles and breathless laughter. In the end they didn’t need to put on airs of drunkenness to lie together, but it never lasted long. Doc had come into the west to die and one way or another he planned to get there soon. 

The last time Wyatt met Doc was there in Glenwood Sanatorium, where he died one day in November. Wyatt’s moved on since then, moved away, met so many different people in so many places and he’s spoken about Doc, with people who knew him but more often with people who never really did at all. He doesn’t say Doc wasn’t the man they all think he was, doesn’t say half the kills they think were his were hearsay Doc just never bothered to deny. He’s happy to be the only one left who knew him not just by word of mouth.

Wyatt goes to bed at night, tonight, and thinks of his friend like he does so often. He left him there in Glenwood Springs when he died for Kate to bury, regretted it then as he regrets it now and to this day no one really knows that he was there. He let him have his final mystery. He let Kate be the one who grieved in public.

He regrets that, he thinks, and then again he doesn’t: no one else but him ever needs to know Doc was at least as much his as hers. And in the end he’ll always remember the man he met one day and not the legend.


End file.
